Issue Fetching Inbox Mails with huge amount of Emails

[Ebrahim A. Senejani]

Dear Friends,
We have a problem with an email account with a huge incoming emails. now it has 1.3 Million emails in it's Inbox and growing (This inbox is related to an automation system).
Outlook, Thunderbird and even RoundCube/Horde Webmails freeze while we open them.
We have a software mail client which cannot fetch emails.
Is it related to filesystem or Postfix mail server?

thanks in advanced

 

[Bitpalast]

It is related to the number of mails.

1.3 million emails means at least 1.3 million separate files. I'd say that this is too much for any email client to download or at least it will take a very long while. And if you are saying that this is continuously growing, the email client will never get done with downloading the mails. Once the first download is completed (if ever), it needs to start the next immediately. For mail software you could try to configure it to only download the headers of emails, but not the body, to speed things up. But anyway, 1.3 million - man, this is just too much. I wonder why someone would even consider to maintain such a large number of mails in a mailbox. Isn't this self-explanatory that it won't work?

I'd recommend to stop the flood, because this will not only cause trouble with the email client, but also the server backup. It will take a considerable amount of time to backup all the files. And it will also eventually create problems with the file system itself, because this will run out of handles/inodes.

 

[Ebrahim A. Senejani]

Thanks Peter for your reply.
This inbox is for our automation system.
You mean there is not any solution in plesk? event we download periodically emails?

 

[Bitpalast]

What kind of solution would you like to have?

 

[Ebrahim A. Senejani]

fetching mail in our mail client software?
and one more question: How many emails it can fetch without problem? (if there is not any solution we have to download emails periodically and delete them in inbox)

 

[Bitpalast]

There is no solution but to reduce the number of emails in the account. You'd experience the same issue on any server, this is not Plesk-related. It is just something developers of mail software don't take into account.

 

[Ebrahim A. Senejani]

Thanks again.
We found that Mail Clients (Outlook & RoundCube) can process maximum 500.000 mails in Inbox.
We had to create 200.000 seperated folders and move mails to them.
In MS Exchange we didn't face this problem.